ACEs and Resilience

Southern Oregon Success is the regional coordinator for work in ACEs (the Adverse Childhood Experiences study) and Resilience, focusing on helping Jackson and Josephine Counties develop a common understanding, vocabulary and approach to challenges across all sectors.

Breakthroughs from the Adverse Childhood Experiences study on how brain development occurs and the impacts of trauma on health and social skills have led to innovative and highly effective “trauma-informed” approaches in education, human services, public safety and workforce development to help build resilience in children, families and communities.

We’re committed to making Southern Oregon a “trauma-informed” region.

We’re not re-creating the wheel in doing so.

A resilience effort called the Self-Healing Community Initiative over the past decade in Cowlitz County, Washington has resulted in:

Births to teen mothers going down 62% and infant mortality going down 43%;

Youth suicide and suicide attempts going down 98%;

Youth arrests for violent crime dropping by 53%;

High school dropout rates decreasing by 47%;

And similar results have been seen in other counties. We’re not re-creating the wheel, we’re building Self-Healing, high-capacity, resilient counties in Southern Oregon.

With financial support from our three local Coordinated Care Organizations, AllCare, Jackson Care Connect and PrimaryHealth, our ACEs and Resilience effort is providing trauma-informed training sessions and events at no cost to schools, agencies, businesses and community groups. Our Southern Oregon ACEs Training Team has presented training sessions to over 10,000 people across all sectors in Jackson and Josephine Counties since May of 2016. For more information on the trainings, or to schedule a training session at no cost for your school or organization, please email peter_buckley@southernoregonsuccess.org.

“RESILIENCE IN ACTION” PRESENTATION BY DR. KEN GINSBURG: POWER POINT AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD FOR ALL INTERESTED AT THIS LINK.

REACHING TEENS WORK GROUP

Using a comprehensive cross-sector curriculum/toolkit developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Reaching Teens,” we’re working with all levels of education, health care, mental health care, human services and public safety to develop greater understanding and skills to mitigate the impacts of ACEs and to help build resilience in children and youth in our communities. The group meets on the first Friday of each month at 8:30 am at the Southern Oregon Education Services District (SOESD) to dig into the material together. For more information, please email peter_buckley@southernoregonsuccess.org

“No matter what you do, who you are, where you come from … We’re going to hold you to expectations, but we’re going to support you and we’re going to help you non-stop. And you can throw anything at us that’s negative, any anger you’ve got inside, any apathy, whatever as a student and you can do that every day. But we’re still going to come back the next day and be there for you. And I think the kids here feel that and understand it.”–Adam Drew, English Teacher, McGloughlin Middle School, Medford, Oregon

Southern Oregon Success is working to support innovative new programs in all levels of education that will serve as model programs for other schools across our region and across the state. We have helped to introduce or expand trauma-informed practices in every school district in Jackson and Josephine counties.

We’re partnering with AllCare in their effort to provide no-cost training for preschool and elementary school teachers in the PAX Good Behavior Game, a highly effective and fun way to teach students who have experienced trauma the skills needed to self-regulate. The game is an evidenced-based tool, developed over the past decade plus, and introduced to our region by the Phoenix/Talent School District in 2016. In just over 3 months of using the Good Behavior Game in their first grade classes, the district has seen classroom disruptions decrease by an average of 66%.

Thus far, AllCare has funded the training for over 500 educators in our region, and the PAX Good Behavior Game is being used by almost all districts in our region. For more information on PAX, visit their website at http://goodbehaviorgame.org

In addition, our partner group, the Southern Oregon Early Learning Services hub (SOELS) works proactively to make sure that our ACEs and Resilience trainings are scheduled with preschool and daycare staffs throughout the region, and are part of the early childhood education programs in higher education here.

And speaking of higher education, Rogue Community College and Southern Oregon University have worked with ACE Interface to train 8 staff members at each institution to be in-house trainers in ACEs and Resilience across departments.

During his spring 2018 visit, Dr. Ken Ginsburg, a national specialist in resilience work, remarked that Southern Oregon might be the only place in the country where ACEs and Resilience work is embedded at all levels of education, and SOU might be the first university in the country to take a comprehensive, university-wide approach.